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TinEye - The Reverse Image Search Engine

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TinEye: An image search engine for finding copies of your pictures

TinEye is a different kind of search engine.

"It's being used by researchers who need to find where an image came from to provide attribution, even people who are trying to find out who people are in old photos. We had somebody who had a photograph of a soldier who'd arrived on the beach at Normandy and they couldn't find their name. They did a whole bunch of searches on TinEye and found a tiny little photo on an American website that listed everybody who'd gone to Normandy with a photograph. That's exactly when TinEye is useful, when you have an image but no words." TinEye CEO Leila Boujnane in an interview with PCPro


Rather than matching words, it matches images. It's also my favourite FireFox add-on! Your art and images - where are they now? TinEye can be used to find stolen art, as well as to track the spread of images and memes across the internet (Lolcats, anyone?)
"I love that icon! What a beautiful photo! Where is it from?"

If you see a wonderful banner, a painting you like the look of, an icon, or uncredited piece of art and you want to find out who painted it and where it came from, or even a Lolcat that you remember with a different caption, then TinEye can help!


First launched on May 6, 2008, it was beta only for a while, and now is freely available to everyone. You can find it at TinEye.com

Warning!

TinEye is addictive. I now automatically install the plugin on every computer I'm on! Including at work!

Why are you looking for pictures?

How can TinEye help you?

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Who Am I?

My interest in TinEye

I'm an artist of sorts, and a marine biology postgraduate student - this means I have both a stake in seeing where my art gets to, an interest in artists and finding the creators of images, and a lot of practice researching online! (The better you get, the fewer times you have to go get a book, and the more you can get from the databases)

I also work as a librarian, which mainly involves helping people with computers, but has a bit of research thrown in!

If you'd like to set up your own lens, please join these awesome people!

Registration

The Benefits of Signing Up on TinEye

You don't have to have an account - and I hardly ever remember to log in to mine (I created it because it was required when still in beta mode)

But if you do sign up your searches are saved and you get permanent URL links to your searches that can be bookmarked, shared with friends, blogged, and so on - rather than discarded after 72 hours.

Have You Used TinEye?

If you have, I'd be interested in hearing your stories! Please leave me a comment later in the lens sharing your experience?


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How To Use TinEye - Searches and Plugins

Searching For Images




"We received a number of e-mails from companies that run online dating services and basically what their members have done is use TinEye to actually find out if a profile is fake"
Site users would submit profile images to TinEye and discover that they were freely available online. The Daily Herald Tribune

You can enter the image directly on the search page or you can install the Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer plugin or the Bookmarklet for any browser (which sits in your bookmarks and searches for images on whatever page you are one when you click it).

Getting the image URL
Rightclick on the picture
Select Copy image location/image URL from your browser popup menu (which it is varies between browers)

or
Enter the address of the page the picture is on. TinEye will pull all the images it can find and ask you which one you want to search for.
(It doesn't always get everything). This acts the same way as the Bookmarklet.

But the picture isn't online!
If you've got an old photo sitting on your hard drive and you want to know where it came from, you can upload a file directly to TinEye.
Restrictions: Up to one megabyte (1MB) and as a JPEG, GIF or PNG.

Or install the addon
...and simply rightclick on interesting images as you browse.

TinEye Reverse Image Search
TinEye is a reverse image search engine built by Id%uFFFDe currently in beta. Give it an image and it will tell you where the image appears on the web.
Install the TinEye plugin for FireFox
The plugin adds a right-click menu item that allows you to search for an image to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.

Version 0.7
Works with Firefox: 1.5 - 3.6.*
Updated November 2, 2009
Developer Idee Inc
Homepage http://www.tineye.com/
Rating Rated 5 out of 5 stars 51 reviews
Downloads 364,616
Install the TinEye plugin for IE
(Warning: automatically begins installing)
Bookmarklet - TinEye
The TinEye bookmarklet allows you to search for any images appearing on the web page you are viewing, without having to go to TinEye first. Unlike the TinEye plugin - which allows you to right-click an image to search for it - the bookmarklet is a little script that is run from your browser's bookmark menu. When you click the bookmarklet, it submits the URL of the web page you are viewing to TinEye, fetches the images, and asks you to choose which image to search (just like when you paste a web page URL to the TinEye search page).

Note: The TinEye bookmarklet is recommended for users of Opera, Safari and Safari for the iPhone (which do not support the TinEye plugin).
TinEye Reverse Image Search: Google Chrome Extension
This is the official TinEye extension for Chrome.

This extension works on Windows and Linux. When Chrome supports it, a Mac version will be coming soon.

Searching For Images

A Video Walkthrough

(Note, this was made a year ago, when TinEye was still in beta mode)
TinEye.com - Walkthrough
by TouchPhoto | video info

4 ratings | 1,884 views
curated content from YouTube

Is TinEye Any Good?

What do you think?


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Is it worth using TinEye to search for images?

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Yes! It's really helpful!

EMangl says:

tineye is a great tool to track pictures, but i also use images.google.com

Posted August 23, 2011

Pastiche says:

I use TinEye to check out images on lenses and also to look at how my own images are being used.

Posted August 10, 2011

bjhughes says:

I never heard of TinEye - but thanks to your lens, will definitely check it out ....

Posted September 27, 2010

makingamark says:

Very useful - I've added this in as a featured lens on http://www.squidoo.com/groups/resourcesforartists

Posted August 10, 2010

burgessvillian says:

I never heard of this before. I m learning a lot from lenses. Yours is very informative.

Posted April 28, 2010

No It's useless/another one is better/I have other concerns.

nikhelbig says:

tried it out with one of my most stolen images -- didn't register anything :(

Posted November 04, 2011

EditionH says:

I tested tineye with an image that is stolen from Zazzle and pops up almost every month.
Tineye does not find the stolen copy even though the url is the same for the most part.

Posted March 23, 2011

 
view all 11 comments

Cool Searches - some of the most interesting TinEye search examples

You Suck At Zazzle #6: Image theft

If it's not yours - don't use it (unless it's free clip art allowed for commercial purposes!!)

Very many times, I've stumbled into an odd little Zazzle shop full of stolen images - each picture in a different style, blurry, of a popular and well known image, or even still with the signature of the original artist on.

From the gallery view (although not the product view because of the weird flash-zoom effect), a quick click and Tineye search often brings me straight to the original artist (usually on deviantART).
You Suck At Zazzle #6: Image theft
by sixaxis66 | video info

24 ratings | 1,778 views
curated content from YouTube

Something For Everyone: Finding Larger Images

A practical application of TinEye

One of my favourite tricks with TinEye is using it to find a larger image from an icon or cropped version, and from there I can find a webpage with more context. This allows me to do two things:

1) Find out who or what the picture is about and where it came from

2) Find a larger version that I can use.

For example, in the lens below (which links to) a Lord of the Rings Facebook Parody, I created fake Facebook images for the Lord of the Rings characters as they updated their statuses. To find some of these images, I would simply use Google - but if it was too small, or filtered and edited or cropped in a way I didn't like - or if there was no information (e.g. which of the films it appeared in) then i could use TinEye to get a better picture.

Furthermore - if you want a closer look at one of the photos, you can use TinEye to find a larger version!
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Examples of Success... My First Art Theft

Finding My Stolen Artwork - Symbolic Flows(Colours of the Imagination)

This is my most popular image in my Zazzle store, and my most viewed painting on RedBubble.
it is also my first known case of art theft...

Symbolic Flows - Colours of the Imagination print
Symbolic Flows - Colours of the Imagination

The TinEye search found it in another gallery on DeviantART - the file was renamed and wouldn't have come up when searching for related keywords. The user had uploaded it under their name and claimed ot have made it using a variety of (increasingly farfetched) techniques. (Actually, this last bit was just silly, as I tell everyone who bothers to read the description that it was painted in ArtRage)

(Note: the image has been taken down , since I reported it, but remains in the cache)

Finding Music

Search the album cover from your own photo!

TinEye Music
by ideeinc | video info

17 ratings | 12,104 views
curated content from YouTube

Winter Fox: Example Search

TinEye and DeviantART

I picked a much more popular picture for my next demonstration - Winter Fox, a gorgeous photograph of a red fox standing in the snow, from Nate Zeman on DeviantART.

winter fox

Winter Fox, by Nzeman on DeviantART

And here is my permanent URL to the search results

Understanding the Results

Identifying theft from searches, using the results

This photograph brought up eighteen results.<br /> <br /> <br />

This photograph brought up eighteen results.


This photograph brought up eighteen results.
Note the size - the deviantART thumbnail view is about 100 pixels wide (varies with image)
The thumbnail appears on user profile pages, when they favourite or feature a picture.
In other words? Not theft.

This allows you to eliminate half the search results for this image.
And focus on the problems...

Finding The Artist

Finding the original artist through TinEye

I searched on this cropped image of the 'island girl' in the hopes of finding the original artist.

I searched on this cropped image of the 'island girl' in the hopes of finding the original artist.

I searched on this cropped image of the 'island girl' in the hopes of finding the original artist.
To my surprise, she pops up all over the internet - and is actually a mermaid! Now, twenty results isn't huge, but most will be useless.
As you can see, there is a whole mix of images, including larger versions.
Now, I know I have a modified version, and that the original would be either the same size or larger, so I sort by 'Biggest Image'.
From there I select the largest - one with a small signature in the corner. Unfortunately, it's still unreadable. It now looks like a photomanipulation (there's a carving behind her, and the rock and mermaid are much more detailed than the background)
So I search again, using the larger image.
Unfortunately, it's the best match around - but it does bring up thirty four results, this time around. A quick scan shows that most of them are blogs or photobucket accounts, nothing that looks like an artist's site (I check a few, but don't find anything useful), and none of the blogs and collections of mermaid pictures credit the original artist.
Scanning the file names shows a few repeated uses of 'IslandMermaid.jpg" so I try a <a href="http://deviantart.com">DeviantART</a> and a <a href="http://images.google.co.nz/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi">Google Image</a> search (which both bring up a lot of hits), but either the phrase 'Island Mermaid" is too common, or that wasn't the original filename, and I find nothing.

A more careful look shows that all the elements - the rock, the girl and her flower, the palms and the carving - look Maori or Pasifika. So perhaps 'pacific mermaid' might yield better results...


Tracking Down Photographs From An Email

Finding the original picture

Someone sent my manager one of those memish 'Best Photographs of... [insert year here]" emails, with some rather fantastic photographs. Unfortunately, there was no credit given, and she wanted to know where they showed. A quick google found theoriginal site the email came from, which was equally unhelpful.

So I dived into TinEye. (Actually, first I installed it).
The results pages were many, so I found the biggest versions and started looking for official site names. And finally I found them... credited in the Guardian website, but not coming up in TinEye. Of course, all I had to do then was search for the original website, and voila!
I had found the National Geographic! And a bit of browsing through their galleries turned up the photos, and descriptions.
Through the Lens: National Geographic Greatest Photographs (National Geographic Collectors Series)

Through the Lens: National Geographic Greatest Photographs (National Geographic Collectors Series)

by: National Geographic

Amazon Price: $6.00 (as of 02/14/2012)Buy Now
List Price: $16.95

Navigating TinEye

Interpreting the Results

If only a few results come up, it's easy. If a lot of results are listed, it gets confusing. Here are some tips to figuring out the search results.

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Size Matters

If it's tiny, it is probably an avatar, an image link more...0 points

2

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Look For Larger Versions

If you're starting from a cropped image, find the least more...0 points

3

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Don't Trust It

TinEye isn't complete. It also retains cached imag more...0 points

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Look at the URLs

The image URLs may have the original artist or tit more...0 points

TinEye Failures: My Daily Deviation

What do you mean, nothing?

TinEye isn't perfect.. It began with 702 million pages, and as of the 22nd of October, it has indexed billions of images, and still isn't turning up most of my known duplicates. For example, this search on one of my stock images.

As you can see above, it found nothing.



This photo is my most popular stock image and has been downloaded over 600 times.

Finding Your Images In Other Ways

When TinEye fails you...

Google Similar Images allows you to find similar pictures from your results

Above, is an example of what I found when searching for the same picture I found through TinEye. As you can see it brings up more - but all are associated with my title and belong to me.

Google Image Search

You can search the title, the artist name, or the subject.
One trick of mine is searching part of the file name - eg (title).jpg and (title).png (of other formats - or (artist name)
this is obviously doesn't find images with the fileneames changed, but does find quite a few. Remember my stock photo?

Well, this is what I found...


(By the way - Google Image search also only brought back my original DeviantART page, so did no better than TinEye)

Image Databases: Search and Retrieval of Digital Imagery

Image Databases: Search and Retrieval of Digital Imagery

Amazon Price: $55.00 (as of 02/14/2012)Buy Now
List Price: $163.00
Used Price: $48.00

Other Image Searches

What else is there?

Do you know of any other tools to track copies of images? What's your favourite way of finding pictures?

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GazoPa similar image search

GazoPa is an image search engine that search for s more...0 points

2

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Google Images

Google Images. The most comprehensive image search more...0 points

Share Your Story

How Has TinEye Helped or Hindered You?


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tineye is very helpful, makes it easier to report users more...0 points

Some Twittered Testimonials

Real Experiences of TinEye

Best of:

Community write-ins:

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The Idee Blog

News From the Developers of TinEye

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TinEye Reviews

Other opinions on the Image Search

Quite a few people around the interent have used TinEye - read their reviews!
Privacy pitfalls of online dating
Try searching for the image using TinEye and Google Image Search before uploading it. And be aware that search technology and facial recognition technology is rapidly evolving." Also good to know is that many popular dating sites have trouble with ...
Simple SEO Facts: Images & Link Building Value
Using a tool known as tineye.com, just paste in your company image logo URL. BAM, and you'll probably get hundreds, potentially thousands of link opportunities, instantly. Next, you'll have to set up a Google alert so that you can monitor the various ...
"Online datingsites zijn privacynachtmerrie"
Zelfs als de foto's niet meer aan het profiel gekoppeld zijn of er een valse naam wordt gebruikt, kunnen ze de gebruiker nog steeds identificeren via diensten zoals TinEye en Google Image Search. En gezichtsherkenningstechnologie wordt alleen maar ...
Come smascherare un falso profilo di Facebook!
Iniziamo ad analizzare la fotografia del profilo. La foto utilizzata come immagine personale è vera oppure copiata da internet? Per scoprire questo, possiamo utilizzare il motore di ricerca TinEye o la funzionalità di Google Google Search by Image per ...
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TinEye

Dear Images: Art, Copyright and Culture

Dear Images: Art, Copyright and Culture

by: Karsten Schubert, Daniel McClean

Amazon Price: $44.26 (as of 02/14/2012)Buy Now
List Price: $59.95
Used Price: $28.00

Copyright and Image Searches

Other Useful Lenses

These lenses all go into more detail about copyright and image searching. If you have something similar, let me know and I'll consider adding it!


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You thought We Wouldn't Notice

A Blog Dedicated to Copyright Infringement

Welcome to 'you thought we wouldn't notice' a site dedicated to pointing out those things that give you that feeling of 'haven't I seen that somewhere before?"
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Clip Art

What if I want to find copyright-free images to use?

If you want pictures and can't draw or photograph or otherwise create them yourself, then you need to look at stock images and clipart. There are quite a lot of clip art packs available - they usually contain a CD-ROM (or several) of images. For stock sites, these usually cost money! But if you have a look around the web you should find quite a few.
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Find It Again

Final Table of Contents

  1. Warning!
  2. Why are you looking for pictures?
  3. Who Am I?
  4. Registration
  5. Have You Used TinEye?
  6. How To Use TinEye - Searches and Plugins
  7. Searching For Images
  8. Is TinEye Any Good?
  9. Cool Searches - some of the most interesting TinEye search examples
  10. You Suck At Zazzle #6: Image theft
  11. Something For Everyone: Finding Larger Images
  12. Examples of Success... My First Art Theft
  13. Finding Music
  14. Winter Fox: Example Search
  15. Understanding the Results
  16. Finding The Artist
  17. Tracking Down Photographs From An Email
  18. Navigating TinEye
  19. TinEye Failures: My Daily Deviation
  20. Finding Your Images In Other Ways
  22. Other Image Searches
  23. Share Your Story
  24. Some Twittered Testimonials
  25. TinEye On Twitter
  26. The Idee Blog
  27. TinEye On Twitter
  28. TinEye Reviews
  29. TinEye
  31. Copyright and Image Searches
  32. You thought We Wouldn't Notice
  33. Clip Art
  34. Feedback!
  35. My thanks to...

My thanks to...

The following lens for it's HTML tips :D
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by

Flynn_the_Cat

I'm a Marine Biology post-graduate student, digital artist, traditional artist and photographer, obsessive reader, librarian and internet addict.

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More About Images and Copyright 

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Artists and Copyright 

What are my rights? How can I protect my art?

Electronic Highway Robbery: An Artist's Guide to Copyrights in the Digital Era

Electronic Highway Robbery: An Artist's Guide to Copyrights in the Digital Era

by: Mary E. Carter

Amazon Price: $18.95 (as of 02/14/2012)Buy Now

~$19
A complete guide to copyright law as it applies to the current digital arts market describes recent, real-world cases that illustrate both legal and illegal copying and uses clear, non-technical language to answer essential questions. (All Users).

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